In a telephone interview on Fox News on the morning of November 3, President Donald Trump revealed that a deal had been struck with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cease the annual provision of US$3.8 billion in military assistance after 2026. “We already agreed that by the end of this year, we won’t be paying Israel,” he said. “Now we’ll help Israel if they need it.” This was a deal that had been reached “months ago”.
The current funding arrangements arose out of a pledge from the Obama administration to supply military assistance to Israel over the period from 2019 to 2028 for a decade, amounting to US$38 billion. Each year, Washington would supply $US3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and US$500 million in missile defence funding. The memorandum replaced the previous MOU signed in 2007 that expired in 2018, worth US$30 billion. (Since its founding, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US economic and military assistance, receiving US$300 billion in inflation adjusted terms between 1948 and 2024.)
In a September 2016 fact sheet released by the White House Office of the Press Secretary, the MOU was described as permitting “Israel to update the lion’s share of its fighter aircraft fleet – including through the acquisition of additional F-35s – increase its missile defense, and acquire other defense capabilities needed to meet its threat environment.” But these new arrangements were also intended to eliminate two “anomalies” deemed problematic to US interests, the first being Off Shore Procurement, under which Israel was given the luxury of using up to 26.3% of its annual FMF package on non-US products, and Israel’s use of FMF funds to acquire fuel. The press release, in satisfied tones, noted that Israel would be able to “spend more funding, as much as $1.2 billion per year, on advanced military capabilities that only the United States can provide.” Arms manufacturers had every reason to rejoice.
The Fox News interview lit the fires of speculation. Did Trump’s announcement have anything to do with the midterm elections that the Republicans risked losing by some margin? The memorandum of understanding between the countries did, after all, state that funding would last till 2028. This particular electoral campaign had been marked by the candidatures, and eventual successes, of a number of sharp critics of Israeli policy, with the Democrat’s Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan being foremost among them.
Political memory can be short and, bathed in the shrinking properties of social media, a mere flash. For all that, any partially alert student of politics will be aware that the argument towards greater self-reliance on Israel’s part, and a weaning off the cash supplied by the US military industrial complex, has been a preoccupation for some time. The Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, followed by Israel’s sanguinary retaliation in Gaza, stirred the think tanks and security establishment towards the proposition that such reliance fostered an unnecessary vulnerability that could, at some point, bite.
In September 2025, Netanyahu openly entertained the notion of less-than-splendid isolation in a speech at a conference of the Finance Ministry’s accountant general in Jerusalem. Economically, Israel would “increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” Despite professing to hate the term, calling himself a “believer in the free market”, the PM feared that Israel could find itself “in a situation where our arms industries are blocked. We will need to develop arms industries here – not only research and development, but also the ability to produce what we need.”
An underbaked classical analogy was suggested: Israel would have to become “Athens and super-Sparta.” There was no choice: “in the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us.” Such attempts were not merely gestational. Europe, because of decisions made to encourage “limitless migration”, had seen the greater demographic prominence of a “significant minority” of “belligerent” Muslims. Their presence was catalytic for the creation of “limitations” and encouraging “sanctions” against the Jewish state. Economic sanctions would be followed by arms embargoes. In terms of reputation, Israel was also suffering a battering at the hands of Chinese and Qatari efforts to “influence Western media with an anti-Israel agenda, using bots, artificial intelligence, and advertisements”.
In his May interview with CBS, Netanyahu also expressed his wish to “draw down” US military funding “to zero”. “Let’s start now and do so over the next decade, over the next ten years, but I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.”
The subject of Israel wriggling off the sustenance of the US purse (a purse often used with few conditions) was made clear in a paper published last month by retired Major General Tamir Hayman, Director of Israel’s sanctum of strategic doctrine, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). The document is unfussed, unsettling and unflinchingly parochial. In searching for what he regards as Israel’s evolving “national security concept” after October 7, 2023, Hayman advances several notions, cohering around the idea of a national identity that cannot be questioned. Ten revealing suggestions prioritising the essence of war as “foundational” and peace as “an expression of weakness” are proposed, the fifth being salient to US-Israeli relations. “Although important, the relationship with the United States is driven purely by interests. Furthermore, excessive adherence to restrictions imposed on Israel by a US administration is dangerous: The United States is a ‘declining power’ and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event.”
Hayman considers this loss of feeling as reciprocal and axiomatic to an inevitable, even frosty change. US abandonment will take place, largely due to “the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character”. It follows that Israel will have to take stock. “Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”
The tenth proposal draws on Netanyahu’s concerns about economic risks. A picture of militarised autarky is duly sketched. “Israel’s defense economy is highly vulnerable to long supply chains; therefore, domestic production and investment in the defense-tech sector (defense industries, cyber, and artificial intelligence) must be prioritized over other sectors.” Scientific research aiding technology was fundamental “but should be advanced independently rather than through international frameworks such as ‘Horizon’.”
Often typical in these sojourns of strategic thought is the occluding of a messier, more pungent reality. Hayman neglects the complex, often troubling role played by American Christian Zionists who, while historically antisemitic, treasure Israel as a glorified guardsman janitor, minding the Holy Lands for the Messiah’s second coming and Armageddon’s fiery terminus. Money and support will hardly diminish, nor will their influence on American politics.
It follows that this latest turn by Trump cannot be seen as astonishing or even intrinsically bound to the electoral activism that led to the midterm Democratic Blue Wash in Congress. Military cooperation between the powers, doctrinally and practically, will continue. Weapons of US-manufacture will still find their way into the arsenal of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for ready use, whatever and whoever the targets turn out to be. And the door on further purchases of American military hardware is, as Trump has affirmed, hardly closed.
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